[vtdubief]

Insights very welcome!

I’m a tech savvy but not a technical person evaluating bbpress for my own site (www.troublesometots.com – bbpress is not currently loaded there) and I have a few questions I’m hoping you experienced users can help me with.

I’ve got a moderately high-traffic site (half million page views monthly) and have a lively community of 4-5K members spread over G+ and FB and I’m considering moving that community to a centralized self-hosted location using bbpress. Here are my questions:

1) From what I gather, from a SEO perspective, creating my folder in a subfolder (ie. http://www.troublesometots.com/community) is better then creating a sub-domain or separate site. IF I do that and IF my vibrant community follows me back to my site (not a given for sure) so that I have 4-5K active members on my self-hosted forum, is this going to negatively impact my site performance? And if site performance will degrade would it be better to host the forum separately (sub-domain or separate domain) so that I can better manage the performance of the blog site vs. forum site?

2) If my vibrant community isn’t willing to abandon FB and come to my bbforum, can I delete it later without mucking up my site? Meaning what if a few hundred people come and post/discuss stuff for 6-12 months but then we agree that it’s not really happening. Can I just delete the bbpress (and all related plugins) and go back to my old standard blog? Will this “clean out” any content that was created in the forum? Or is it more complicated than that.

Any insights would be very welcome – thanks for your thoughts!
Cheers,
Alexis

[Lynqoid]

I have recently removed bbPress from one of my websites without any issue (the forum was never used).

Naturally if you add more functionality to your website, especially a forum that will have more writing to the database from your users it’s going to add a hit to performance, but that’s always going to happen. I’m going to guess that your server won’t be able to compete with FB and G+ but it could run smoothly if you have good hosting.